Guilford aims to come to grips with town’s past slavery

Updated 11:16 pm, Wednesday, September 13, 2017

ED STANNARD / HEARST CONNECTICUT MEDIA
Doug Nygren of Guilford displays a Holocaust memorial stone from Germany, which serves as a model for the Witness Stones Project in Guilford.

ED STANNARD / HEARST CONNECTICUT MEDIA
Doug Nygren of Guilford displays a Holocaust memorial stone from Germany, which serves as a model for the Witness Stones Project in Guilford.

Guilford aims to come to grips with town’s past slavery

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GUILFORD >> About 100 people met Wednesday to face the reality of being part of a culture that is still stained by the truth that white people owned black Africans in their own town.

The meeting, held at the Guilford Free Library, was organized by the Witness Stones Project, which plans to embed granite and brass memorials in the sidewalks outside where enslaved people lived in Guilford.

The crowd heard from a panel, then talked about their experiences among themselves and with the rest of the gathering. The fact that slavery was not just a Southern institution was repeated by many, as were the experiences of people witnessing or facing racism in their own lives.

Dennis Culliton, chairman of the Witness Stones Project and an eighth-grade history and language arts teacher at Adams Middle School, told of the history of slavery in Guilford, which began “in the 17th century with the Indian servants of William Leete to the 18th century with the bill of sale of Bocha, a Carolina Indian to Samuel Scranton in 1713 to the record of birth of Pompey to Montros and Phillis in 1729.”

There were about 60 slaves in Guilford in 1774, Culliton said, declining to three in the 1810 census. “The death of the last enslaved person in Guilford is Pompey at 89 years old in 1819,” he said.

The project was inspired by the Stolpersteine, which Doug Nygren, a Guilford resident, saw in Berlin, Germany, where he has an apartment. The small monuments, translated as stumbling blocks, honor Jews and others killed in the Holocaust. That gave him the idea “for how we could make the people who’d been enslaved here be more real to us, that somehow we could be reminded of them and have the memory of them brought to us.”

“The Germans want to remember what happened. They don’t want to hide it,” he said. “To hide it is shame.” In addition to Stolpersteine, the Holocaust is remembered with posters on bus stops and a massive field of stone blocks.

On the other hand, Bristol, England, which was heavily involved in the slave trade, has not been so willing to face its history. A bridge named in honor of a 12-year-old slave named Pero Jones has become covered with “love locks,” according to Hazel Carby, professor of African-American studies at Yale University and a native of Bristol.

Not only the slave traders, but most of the business people of Bristol profited from the sale of Africans, including such mundane trades as “sailmakers and shoemakers.” “It’s a horror story and a crime against humanity,” she said.

Later in the meeting, Culliton pointed out that making barrel staves was once a major industry in Guilford. The barrels held goods that were traded for slaves. “Making barrel staves in Guilford was right where we could put ourselves next to the people from Bristol,” he said.

“In most of Europe and North America, the dominant belief is that the role of the historian is to reveal the truth,” said Carby. However, “at best, history is a story about power, a story about those who won,” she said.

The Rev. Ginger Brasher-Cunningham, pastor of the First Congregational Church for the past two years, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. “I want us to be aware tonight that we are working to build a compassionate community here in Guilford,” she said. “We must believe every person is beloved and cherished.” She said those who feel defensive about being white should “remember that there is so much more for us to learn.”

Marji Lipshez-Shapiro, senior associate director of the Anti-Defamation League of Connecticut and, like all the speakers, a Guilford resident, said that as a Jew she was taught that the Jews during World War II “were led like sheep to the slaughter. … I said, ‘I don’t want anything to do with that. I don’t want to be a victim.’” Like the European Jews, the enslaved Africans were not submissive, she said.

Lipshez-Shapiro said she is working with others on a curriculum and “planting the seeds for much better teaching of enslavement.” In a town that is mostly white, she said, “We need to learn to embrace the conversation and experiences that make us uncomfortable. … We can be really too comfortable here when it comes to the issue of race.”

Among audience members who spoke was the Rev. Harrison West, rector of Christ Episcopal Church, who said his house was owned by slaveholders. “I just have to wonder who lived there, this little shack a part of the house that’s older than the grander … part you see on the street.”

Barbara Johnson said that a sign she hung on her house, saying, “No matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor” in English, Spanish and Arabic, was cut in half. “There is still prejudice today,” she said. “Knowing that slavery was here makes it for me more immediate.”

“I think it’s important to recognize that slavery was economically important in the North as well as something that we usually think of as happening in the South,” said Dolores Hayden. “I think having physical reminders of the history that has taken place in a particular location can be particularly powerful.”

The installation of the first three stones — for Moses, his mother Phillis and Candace — is scheduled for Nov. 2, according to Culliton. For more information go to https://witnessstones.org.